Dreams Beyond Time: On Sacred Encounter and Spiritual Transformation offers readers an overview of dreams research as applied to non-ordinary dreams. Lee Irwin describes four basic types of dreaming: normative, mythic, psychic, and transpersonal, and he illustrates each type with specific dream examples. These types of dreaming are then used as a lens to look more closely at additional dream types that indicate dreaming as a process of creative discovery. Through virtual dreaming encounters, latent human potentials are revealed and suggest aspects for spiritual development based on dream recording, interpretation, and analysis. In turn this leads to a metaphysical description that is pan-sentient, illustrating a vivid, living universe of process-becoming in which certain dream types reveal mythic, psychic, and transpersonal capacities as intrinsic to a deeper more awakened sense of intersubjective self-awareness. While dream theories from many diverse authors are explored, the author uses an existential and phenomenological method to analyze dreaming contents in relationship to altered states of mind, trance, out of body and near-death experience, meditation, imagination, and stages of lucid self-awareness. Transpersonal dreams are given considerable attention in relationship to mystical traditions, paranormal research, and the comparative anthropology of self.
Lee Irwin is professor emeritus, Religious Studies Department, College of Charleston.
Acknowledgments Introduction: Touching the Whale Part One: Dreaming Values Chapter One: Discovering the Dream Chapter Two: Deconstructing the Dream Part Two: Dreaming Encounters Chapter Three: Dream Cosmologies Chapter Four: The Psycho-Ontological Matrix Part Three: Dream Interpretations Chapter Five: The Metaphysics of Discovery Chapter Six: The Reconstructed Dream Conclusion: A Self-Surpassing Multiverse Appendix One References Index About the Author
Lee Irwin's lifetime of dream journaling and his many unusual dream experiences gives Dreams Beyond Time a unique first-person authority. Dreams Beyond Time guides us to a deeper understanding of dreams and dreaming by surveying much previous scholarship, and provides its own open-ended, unique, and very valuable perspective based on decades of experience. Strongly recommended-there is no other book on dreams and dreaming like this one. -- Arthur Versluis, author of American Gurus, American Gnosis
